by Rachel Kane
“Oh, sure. All the time.”
“I don’t think it has ever happened to me. Although, how would I know? Maybe it happens and I miss it.”
“Wendy had her foot halfway up my pants leg. I don’t think you would’ve missed that.”
The way Val shudders delights Charlie. He doesn’t try to hide the fact that it bothers him. Again that transparency, that honesty.
“I’m not sure how I’d react to that,” Val says. “Someone touching me without permission.”
“On the one hand, you just get used to it,” says Charlie, “because it never stops happening. On the other, yeah, sometimes I wish I could be encased in…in an exoskeleton, so they’d leave me alone.”
“You could take the form of a lobster, and then when they try to touch you—snap!”
Val says it with such earnestness that it’s hard to tell whether he means it as a joke or as an actual plan, and Charlie can’t help it, he’s laughing at the idea of brandishing a big lobster-claw at Wendy, at the guys who think they have some right to him just because he’s small and pretty, at the whole world.
Snap!
How long has it been since he had a friend? Someone he could sit and talk to, without all that worry that someone was going to come on to him? Not like Gino back at work; they got along just fine, but you weren’t going to spill your life secrets to a guy who dressed as Santa for a couple of months out of the year.
What keeps happening in Charlie’s life is that he thinks he makes a friend, only to find out that they want to push it further. It runs the gamut. Maybe it’s Wendy with her intrusive toes. Maybe it’s Sam, this guy he was hanging out with for a while, until Sam emerged from the bathroom wearing nothing but an expectant smile. You little whore, Sam had yelled, when it became obvious Charlie wasn’t interested.
Getting yelled at wasn’t the worst thing that could happen in those circumstances. Worse things had happened before. Much, much worse. When Sam had yelled at him, pushed him around, slapped the side of his head, Charlie thought, at least this will be over soon. At least in a minute I can go home.
The difference was so vast he could not put it into words.
He felt safe around Val. Protected, really. Which didn’t make any sense; normally when you think of protective guys, you think big bruisers, guys who are protecting their stake, their claim on you, more than really protecting you.
Yet here it was. He knew Val wouldn’t cross the line. He could just talk to Val, and it was okay.
But it’s getting late.
“Can we…can we do this again?” Charlie asks, reaching for his wallet.
Val looks appalled, watching Charlie pull out a few dollars. “You don’t have to pay. I can pay.”
“I’d really prefer to do it myself,” Charlie says.
It’s a test. Just a small one. A tussle for control. Does Val realize that? Logically, he should pay. He has the most money. It won’t bother him at all. But this is a test about a level below logic.
Val is thinking again. He is studying the wrinkled bills Charlie put on the table. “We could consider it a transaction,” he says finally. “I helped you escape from Wendy, and in return, you bought me a surprisingly good espresso.”
“Sure, you could put it like that.”
“You asked if we could do this again. I assume you’ll need more help, because Wendy will not stop her pursuit.”
Actually, I just like talking to you, and I think you like talking to me too, and it has been so long since I’ve had a safe friend… But he isn’t sure how you say something like that to Val.
“Exactly,” he agrees. “I guess I’ll grab my bike from your car—”
“No, let me drive you home, it’s no trouble. Or, if you weren’t going home—”
“No, I don’t mind, I’ll take my bike,” Charlie says.
Here’s the thing. He suddenly doesn’t want Val to see where he lives.
He’s not ashamed of the bus. Not by any means. The bus has been a great place to stay, and he has big plans for it.
But right now… Right now, he doesn’t want Val to know he uses a sleeping bag rather than a bed. It’s too dangerous. Val might misunderstand, might think Charlie wants something from him, other than his time, other than jokes about lobsters.
He can’t take that risk.
6
Val
“Hashbrowns. With onions. Not with cheese, not with bacon, not with tomatoes. I have tried all of these. Only hashbrowns with onions. I have decided they are my favorite.”
“Val, it’s two in the morning,” Theo whispered into the phone.
I looked down at the diner table, where five plates were arrayed in front of me. Of course, I knew what time it was. “But I’m trying something new, and I wanted you to know.”
I heard him shuffling, heard the squeak of hinges and the latch of a door. Now, in a louder voice, he said, “Val, look, you know I’m happy you’re expanding your horizons—”
“You, specifically, are the one who asked me to do so.”
“—but most of the world is asleep right now. It would be one thing to wake me up for an emergency, but waking me up to tell me about hashbrowns isn’t urgent.”
Theo had always been the one person I could talk to, but even with him, I had trouble. How could I tell him that I couldn’t sleep at night, since leaving the job? That my new apartment might have been well-furnished and comfortable, but it was still quiet and empty, with nothing for me to do? That after I lay in bed for an hour, my thoughts wouldn’t settle down, so I had to get up again?
He’d just tell me to get used to my new life. That it was an adjustment period. That I was getting my feet under me.
Indeed. My feet were under me, and they had paced the length of the apartment, avoiding the hundred white boxes, while I felt an urgency to do something, anything to fill the emptiness.
“I think leaving the company was a mistake,” I said. “I should go back.”
“You can’t go back,” said Theo. “It doesn’t work like that. But Val, seriously, if you’re lonely—”
“I’m not lonely. I don’t get lonely.”
A pause. “Everybody gets lonely sometimes.”
“Do you? You have Micah, are you still lonely?”
“Well, sure. Micah went to a conference last month, and I felt like a little kid who lost his teddy bear. Couldn’t sleep, I just grabbed his pillow and put my face into it, thinking about him.”
“I’m trying to think of what the equivalent would be, for missing a multimillion-dollar firm.” I poked at the hashbrown with my fork. Now that it was cooling off, it didn’t seem so appetizing. I was thirsty, but not adventurous enough to try diner coffee, and their water tasted of chlorine. No spring water available.
What was I doing here? Why was I wandering the streets at two in the morning?
Was this loneliness?
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Val, but you’ve got to stop calling me this late. I love you, you’re family, you’re one of my best friends, but you’re worrying me when you do this.”
“Can I get you anything else, hon?” asked the waitress, carrying her carafe of coffee from table to table. She looked down at my plates, at the uneaten hashbrowns.
“I think I’m done,” I told her. Or maybe I was telling Theo.
“Hello,” I said. “This is Val. Val Harrison. We had coffee this afternoon.”
Charlie gave me a sleepy laugh. “Yes, I remember who you are, Val. What time is it?”
I looked down at my watch, but couldn’t see the face. “I’m not sure. It’s after two. I wanted to ask…”
A car passed, and I was bathed in red from its taillights. Around me, Corinth was quiet and dark. I had the strangest feeling that parts of it had stopped existing, the parts I couldn’t see, the dark shapes in the shadows, punctuated by the real world illuminated by streetlights.
Is the world real? Do you ever feel like it isn’t?
That’s not what I was g
oing to ask.
Do you ever find yourself friendless and alone in the middle of the night?
That wasn’t it, either.
“What was it?” Charlie asked. “Is everything okay?”
“I… I just wanted to ask if you got home safely.”
“Sure, of course I did,” he said. “Hours ago.”
“Ah. Okay. Good. Thanks, Charlie.”
“Was that it? Are you…?”
I had started to hang up, but then I didn’t. I listened, pressing the phone a little harder against my ear. Charlie was breathing softly, and I wondered what he was going to ask there, before his voice trailed off.
“Do you like hashbrowns?” I asked.
A pause, then he chuckled. Charlie laughs in a way I understand. Not once today did I get the feeling he was laughing at me.
You can’t be too sensitive about people laughing at you; it will happen, and when it does, you have to keep going. I’d known other CEOs who were thrown into absolute fury over being laughed at. To them, it was an assault on their dignity. Their status was at stake. In their minds, once you become the joke, you can’t be the leader anymore.
But how people respond to being the joke is much more important.
It doesn’t mean it never hurts, though…and when you meet someone who laughs at much of what you say, but it’s as though you’d just told a joke, or had a great insight, it feels so much different, so much better, than when you’re the joke.
“Yeah,” he said simply. “I love ‘em.”
“I’ve never had them before tonight. But I found a diner and ordered them. I was getting tired of spaghetti. Do you get tired of things, Charlie? I’m sure you do, most people do. I’m sorry, I’m keeping you up.”
“What? No, it’s okay, I don’t have to be at work till noon tomorrow anyway. It’s a fun question: Do I get tired of things? Yes. I’m sure I do. I’m tired of my boss, Mr. Rumson. I try to have empathy for him, I’m a big believer in empathy, but it doesn’t go both ways with him. He’s a taker, and he thinks of us as replaceable—and I mean, he’s right, every year it’s new people in Santa’s Village—but I just wish for once he’d look at me like I’m a human being.”
Making a mental note to look up this Rumson later, I said, “I don’t get tired of things. When I like something, I want to do it again and again. Once I went to the same pizza restaurant two hundred days in a row.”
“Wow, it must have been really good pizza,” said Charlie.
“No,” I said. “That’s the part no one understands. The pizza was fine, not great, but fine. But when I’d think about dinner, my thoughts just gravitated back to them. I think I’ll go down and have a slice. I’ve done everything like that. If I like a pen, I buy five hundred of them. I would probably wear the same suit all the time, if Theo didn’t insist on dragging me to the tailor for new ones. And I thought canned spaghetti would be like that. I thought, aha, here’s the thing I will have every night. But something’s different, Charlie. I don’t want the spaghetti. I don’t know what I want, and it bothers me.”
I heard a rustling on the other end of the line. I imagined Charlie moving around in his nice warm bed. The image in my mind was fuzzy, because there were certain facts I didn’t know about him, for instance, what kind of sheets he had, or whether he slept in pajamas, or perhaps just bottoms, or maybe only in underwear, or even—
I scowled. That was a matter of no interest to me. What Charlie might wear to bed was none of my business, even though now I couldn’t get the thought out of my head, and it confused me, it got tangled in to that sense of loneliness, that sense of needing something.
“Listen,” he said, “do you want to talk? I mean, I know we’re talking now. Do you want to meet me somewhere?”
The anger flared up, and I had to bite it back. I do want to meet you somewhere, I’m lonely and I don’t have anyone to talk to. At the same time, I hated the ideas that had leapt into my head when I thought about him sleeping. Now that I’d thought about it once, I couldn’t get the picture out of my mind. His body, curled into a warm ball under his blanket, the curve of his back a long, gentle slope.
This isn’t what I do. This isn’t what I’m interested in. Why are you doing this to me?
I just had to get my thoughts under control, is all. That’s all this was, my brain becoming undisciplined because of a lack of structure. Too much free time, too much wandering around. I had to find something to focus on, and then these thoughts would go away.
They had to go away. Nobody’s interested in me like that. I have no right to think of anyone like that. Charlie was young, and energetic, and optimistic. He clearly had his pick of people his own age. To think about his body in any way, was simply a self-destructive fantasy on my part.
“Val, are you there?”
“I don’t need to talk anymore. I will be okay.”
“Wait, are you sure?”
“Good night, Charlie.”
“You don’t sound good. Promise me you’ll call tomorrow, okay?”
Why? So I can confuse myself again?
“Okay,” I said.
There was nothing else to do. I went home. I changed into my own pajamas and slipped into my own bed.
Intrusive thoughts aren’t new to me. I have them sometimes. I wondered if I should have a drink. Isn’t that what most people did, when they wanted to calm their thoughts down? Except I didn’t know how to make myself something, and I wasn’t willing to leave the apartment yet again. That would just be more wandering.
It’s not as bad as you’re thinking, I told myself. He was, in fact, asleep. It’s natural that you should have pictured him being asleep.
Then why did it make me so uncomfortable? Other people, most people, thought of each other in that capacity, didn’t they? Hadn’t Theo mentioned that?
I was already reaching for my phone by instinct, but I stopped myself. I could not call Theo about this.
He’d laugh at me. I’d be the joke.
Charlie would laugh at me, if I told him about the distress this was causing me.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t like I was thinking about him in a sexual way. I had done nothing to feel guilty about. It’s not as though I were imagining him absolutely naked, perhaps with one hand slipped between his legs as he slept, his palm pressed tight—
I sat straight up in bed. “You have to stop this, right now,” I told myself. “You’re not allowed to torment yourself. He’s not for you, you don’t have interests in that direction, and even if you did, someone like Charlie would not be interested in someone like you.”
That’s how I ended up on the couch at four in the morning, three bowls of microwaved pasta (another ravioli, spaghetti with meatballs, and alphabet noodles) in front of me on the table, watching infomercials on television, their throbbing intensity flashing into my eyes in my dark living room, clearing my mind of all thought.
“Hello,” I said after calling one of the 800 numbers flashing on the screen. “I am interested in your New Improved Power Mop.”
7
Charlie
“Are you coming home for Christmas?”
“There’s a simple question,” says Charlie, staring at his brother Taggart. “So simple, you already know the answer to it.”
Tag laughs, and it’s a good sound, an honest sound. His brother is the only member of his family that he really trusts anymore. “It is simple. You say you’ll come, I order Mom and Dad to be on their best behavior, and we spend the next two hours listening to Dad complain about the vegetarian turkey.”
He showed up this morning unannounced, knocking on the glass door of the school bus. Charlie had crawled out from his sleeping bag, groggy from his night’s strange interruption. After Taggart came in, he handed Charlie a big box full of blankets and supplies. Like Charlie was homeless. Like he was a refugee or something.
Now they were drinking cocoa using water heated up on the camp stove.
“You can’t stay here forever,”
says Tag. He says you can’t stay here but he means you can’t stay away from home. It’s not the bus that bothers him. It’s the fact that Charlie left the family.
“I’m a grown man now. I’m twenty-two. No reason for me to live with people who don’t approve of me anymore.”
“It’s not… You know it’s not a matter of Mom and Dad approving of you.”
Charlie gives him a smile. Taggart means well, he always does. That’s why he’s kind of an inspiration to Charlie. But at the same time, Taggart was always the star; he had the highest grades, the highest SAT, the brightest future. The fact that he’d gone on to work in wilderness preservation was admirable; their folks would probably have liked it better if he’d been a famous scientist or concert violinist or banker in a three-piece suit, but he was definitely doing something with his life.
And what about Charlie?
“They’re never going to stop giving me hell about not making something of myself,” he says. “So…no. I opt out. I’ve got my bus, I’ve got my freedom.”
Tag leans back and laughs. “I can never tell if you’re a control freak or incorrigibly lazy.”
“Maybe both!”
“If Dad knew I was here, he’d want me to be sure to give you a speech.”
“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, young man!”
Tag’s laughter is part of what Charlie misses about home, about being one of the family.
There are just things he can’t quite explain. It’s no different than his problem with Wendy, or his problem with the big guys who want to treat him like a doll. Everybody’s got a plan for Charlie, everybody’s got a dream, and they’re not really concerned about what he wants.
It makes him think about last night’s weird conversation.
Charlie’s not sure what he wants in life, other than to hang out and enjoy the moment. That’s why he takes these low-stress jobs, Christmas elf in the winter, pool boy in the summer, often yard work or other odd-jobs in between.
